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Tech - - (+1|-0)
It looks like I will never need a fan(self)
9 commentsbyx0x7
I haven't done maximal stress testing yet but pretty dang close. I basically can use my computer with no apologies and it maxes out at 50C. So then why was there a fan in the first place?
I figured it out. It has at least some degree of integrated graphics. Since my graphics card is doing that work the system pretty much can't be put in a condition where a fan is needed outside of some really tightly cpu bottle-necked tasks like generating an infinite chain of crypto hashes.
I can run multiple videos at the same time, run multiple monitors, run decryption on streaming content at 1080p (video over https), all at the same time. I'll probably just set up an alert system if it does go over 60. 80 is consider high and 100 is critical. So an altert at 60 will tell me about something that is out of the norm for anything I've seen it hit and also give me 20C of clearance before it is even considered "high".
So yeah, celeron processors with a dedicated graphics card can be passively cooled with low end heat blocks. I think that's worth knowing. A lot of graphics cards are passively cooled for anything but actual gaming so if you want a really quite system that's probably one of the best ways. If I had SSDs and somehow cut the fan on my primary power supply (likely could be figured out), I could have a soundless system on the cheap. High end cpus are really needed when running windows so windows BS doesn't interrupt game flow. If there is no BS happening on the computer you can run games with tiny cpus because game logic is never that high. The high core counts for gaming are for consistent compute on windows.
This means that with a cceleron plus windows you can have a near silent slightly below mid-range gaming pc for less that $500. I think most people would consider silent gaming PCs to be a $2000 minimum build. That is the cost of windows. Sure you will have one set of fans on during actual gaming but the default could be silent.

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[-]Winston Smith0(0|0)
That's why I'm no hurry to replace my PC's fan/heatsink. The Pi 400 has passive cooling so it's quiet though I miss the snappiness of my main computer; it's an old i3(3.7Gz) with 16Gb of RAM and a radeon RX560 GPU. Nothing exceptional but it did run some games somewhere between HD and UHD.
I used to have a low-end NVidia with passive cooling but there was a screen-tearing issue due to the crappy drivers on Linux so I switched to AMD. I don't think I'll buy another graphics card because I'm not planning on upgrading my rig(aside for a CPU fan). I'm tired of the bulk, noise, the bird's nest of wires in the back and the dust building up in the ventilation holes.
ARM is coming along(Apple excluded). The clock speeds aren't up to x86 and software on the Linux side isn't quite optimized yet but it's still usable for daily use minus modern gaming. It's a bit slow(Pi 400) but it's faster than my similarly specced OPI 3b which does't even have the drivers for the GPU(my bad for buying a single-board computer from a chinese manufacturer; poor support) and I'm not smart enough to build a custom image that would include the Panfrost drivers.
Anyway, my next computer will most likely be a mini PC; small form-factor, relatively quiet with only one tiny 5V fan and low power consumption. Most of them are powered by Celeron CPUs with integrated Intel graphics(which are more suited to games now than they used to be). I've seen some ranging from 200$ to 300$ CDN. They're on Ali Express however. But the hardware is generic enough that getting things to work should be painless.
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[-]LarrySwinger0(0|0)
Can you really do anything useful with a Celeron? I had trouble browsing the web on a Celeron laptop from 2018, it just freezes. That may have been a RAM issue though but it's hard to tell. Every computer I've used with Atom, Celeron, or any of that crap was too shitty for basic web browsing but they also had little RAM so I have trouble finding the weak link.
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[-]Winston Smith0(0|0)
Shouldn't be an issue. I mean, I can browse the web just fine with an OPI 3b with a 1.8Ghz Rockchip CPU. Just for a test, I played Big Buck Bunny on YT at 720p and 60 FPS and I get an average of 15% dropped frames which isn't really noticeable. But the modern Internet is so resource-heavy...
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[-]LarrySwinger0(0|0)
Yes, asking specifically about web browsing. I hate when it takes a few seconds for a page to render.
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[-]x0x72(+2|0)
He's on a Raspberry Pi. But you asked about my Celeron. No issues. I can play Halo on it. I can render videos on it in reasonable time. Browsing is snappy.
Chromebooks will use even weaker processors and they obviously browse the web fine.
I think page rendering it more memory bottlenecked than cpu bottlenecked. I see more delays to render when borrowing a windows machine usually if memory is getting short or accessed a lot by another process.
Remember, almost everything in compute is memory bottlenecked. Bigger processors are what people who don't understand that throw at the problem because they don't know better. Only a few narrow classes of problems are actually cpu bottlenecked and rarely do they have anything to do with UI.
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[-]x0x70(0|0)
But browsers deal with a big chunky fragmented DOM and have to consult a lot of different places in memory before it can be certain its doing the right thing for every pixel on the screen. So hells yeah it's memory bound.
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[-]Winston Smith0(0|0)
I can deal with a few seconds. In the dial-up days it would take a few minutes to display a page with text and a handful of pics using Netscape Navigator. A quad-core Celeron with a decent GPU and sufficient RAM(8 Gig min) should display pages just fine. As long as the OS is easy on resources.
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[-]LarrySwinger0(0|0)
Is this a recent development? I actually have unacceptable OS freezes running Ubuntu on the 2018 laptop with a Celeron + 4 GB RAM. Meanwhile phones from that time with a Snapdragon and the same amount of RAM can run Android just fine. I want to believe in an energy efficient device that can run x86-64 OSes but I'm wary after my experience. I will say that I was running Ubuntu as a Live system in RAM entirely. Maybe it's better when I install to disk. I had a better experience with antix but it'd still freeze now and then.
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[-]Winston Smith1(+1|0)
Running a live session is a different matter as the OS components are loaded in RAM and since there is no swap partition to access you might eventually run out of RAM which would explain the freezes. I had crashes on a Manjaro laptop because I hadn't assigned a swap partition during installation. It has 8GB of RAM but the GPU hogs some of it.
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